“... coherent analysis remains that of scholars who, in the tradition of the great French historian, George Lefebvre, saw it as a “bourgeois revolution”.’ This cheerfully sweeps aside the researches of a whole generation. Cobban, Forster, Taylor, Doyle and Chaussinand-Nogaret have laboured in vain. Magraw is not writing ...”

“... In a letter of May 1919 Hardy told his friend Sir George Douglas he hadn’t been doing much, ‘mainly destroying old papers’. ‘How they raise ghosts,’ he added. He was still at it in September when he complained of the ‘dismal work’ of destroying papers that were of ‘absolutely no use for any purpose God or man’s ...”

“... 1968 cast its vote like this: Winthrop Rockefeller for governor, William Fulbright for senator and George Wallace for President. It has correctly been described as one of the richest little poor states in the union. Today’s Little Rock has a skyline of modern corporatism, housing numerous local monopolies such as Tyson Foods, the Worthen Bank, the Stephens ...”

“... he was for complicated reasons penniless and in practical terms homeless. His surviving brother, George, who would die of intestinal tuberculosis two decades later, was in America with his wife, Georgiana, trying to make his fortune; his dearest friend, Charles Armitage Brown, was on a summer walking tour, having frugally rented out the house he had been ...”

“... major foundations, from established giants like Ford and Rockefeller to relative newcomers such as George Soros’s Open Society Institute, have committed themselves to the new agenda. Much of Amnesty’s recent campaigning has focused on international corporations, and it has succeeded in persuading several, including Shell, BP, Rio Tinto Zinc and British ...”

“... A bullet scraped his chest before hitting his upper arm, and four or five hit his manager, Don Taylor, who was standing between him and the doorway. The keyboard player’s girlfriend saw ‘a kid’ with his eyes squeezed shut emptying a pistol into the rehearsal area. The lead guitarist, an American session man on his first visit to Jamaica, took cover ...”

“... Chinese businesses?’ one Chinese scholar asked me. ‘Why would anyone hate them?’ As Ian Taylor notes in China and Africa, the People’s Republic has had substantial relations with sub-Saharan Africa since at least the early 1950s. Back then, Beijing chose allies for ideological reasons. For a time, it supported the African National Congress in its ...”

“... followed the dotcom ‘recessionette’ in the early 2000s was also an era of fiscal priority, as George W. Bush, when he was paying attention, focused on tax cuts for the rich and corporations, and on military spending for the destruction of Iraq. In this he was abetted by Greenspan, who publicly defended the tax cuts (a violation of central ...”

“... Alain de Botton’s brand of private indifference was a blast of sea-fresh air from the Orkneys: George Mackay Brown’s Beside the Ocean of Time. Its ‘otherness’ may in some degree have seduced the judges, but they all responded to it. Here it was not so much a matter of individuality as of feeling that the author represented the culture of a community ...”

“... He has come into all the material collected by John Lehmann’s commissioned biographer, Martin Taylor, who died before he could write a word of it. He has seen photocopies of the extensive diaries, and he has interviewed the survivors and their descendants. Lehmann himself wrote three volumes of dignified autobiography about his work, his beliefs, his ...”

“... Bessie Parkes, Anna Mary Howitt, Adelaide Procter, Max Hays, Emily Faithfull, Lizzie Siddal, Helen Taylor, Anna Jameson, Jessie White. Many of these women looked on Barbara as an indomitable model. She was not the most intellectually gifted of their number – though she was far from stupid – but few could rival her generosity of spirit. Loyal and ...”

“... its intended purpose because we had to keep the windows open to avoid death by poison gas. George McGovern was running for President, Edward Heath was prime minister, and our landlord had yet to discover how to make water hot. Sick dialogue came easy in Norwich. What Ian always had was a great library, an ominous tide of titles that splashed out of ...”

“... work for him.’ Dr Johnson, an absentee from these pages, was urged by his rich friend John Taylor not to go to Streatham ‘or you must shoot a highwayman . . . I would rather be robbed than do that.’ Johnson replied: ‘But I would rather shoot him in the instant when he is attempting to rob me, than afterwards swear against him at the Old ...”

“... striking figures huddled on the ground’ fill him with ‘grief and rage’. Describing Breonna Taylor as ‘a sleeping woman murdered in her bed’ by police officers in his hometown of Louisville, he feels ‘an impossible dismay’. The protest he had attended in his college town that summer ‘just felt like theatre’. All the emotion of those ...”

“... also speculates in a similar vein about the later and sunnier correspondence with the publisher, George Smith, whose evident pleasure in Brontë’s letters may partly have arisen, she thinks, from the artist’s capacity imaginatively to transform him with her pen, recreating him in a form cleverly designed to soothe his insecurities. Though Brontë’s ...”